Top OpenSim grids set new growth record

The top 40 OpenSim grids totaled 11,717 regions this month, a respectable 4 percent increase over last month’s 11,240. However, adjusted growth is up a record-high 1,377 regions — an increase of 13.3 percent.

But ScienceSim isn’t completely out of the scalability test business. Last week, they were able to get almost 1,000 avatars into a single region.

Biggest growth, as usual, came on the non-profit OSGrid, which gained 841 regions, an increase of 13.4 percent. OSGrid was also the most active grid, with 5,090 users logging in over the past 30 days. But several smaller grids had ever higher percentage point increases — though with smaller region counts. SimWorld increased 53 percent from 19 to 29 regions. The education-focused New Zealand Virtual World Grid grew 43 percent, from 28 to 40 regions. Tertiary Grid also grew by 43 percent, from 21 to 30 regions.

Meta7 was the biggest gainer when it comes to active users, gaining 157 new active users last month, for a total of 1,231 unique logins.

The biggest loser was MyOpenGrid, which lost 195 regions.

(Source: Hypergrid Business grid survey.)

Meanwhile, Second Life’s main grid grew from 31,335 regions in mid May to 31,985 this week, according to Grid Survey, an unusually high increase of 650 regions, or 2 percent. Total private land ownership is still below the peak reached in October 2008.

(Source: Grid Survey)

New grids continue to spring up. This month, we began tracking NeXtLife, MetaverseNexus, GerGrid, Hidden Realm, Dorena’s World, Anubia, NorthGrid and Friendly Grid. The total number of active public grids we monitor each month is now over 80. We are no longer tracking InWorldz and OpenLifeGrid, both of which have split from mainline OpenSim, require proprietary viewers, and do not release their usage statistics.

Meanwhile, there were several hundred downloads of the Diva Distro version of OpenSim, which allows anyone to easily create a four-region hypergrid-enabled mini-grid. We do not track these as part of the OpenSim growth numbers, but we expect that private grids will quickly become a large part of the OpenSim growth story.

Finally, more grids continue to open up to hypergrid teleports, allowing avatars from other grids to teleport in for virtual tourism, shopping, or to attend events. We’re currently tracking more than 54 hypergrid-enabled grids on the Hyperica directory of hypergrid destinations. More grids are expected to embrace the hypergrid with the next release of OpenSim, which adds more security for hypergrid travelers. Hypergrid connectivity makes it less important for artists, retailers, and other content providers to be part of a large, public, social grid in order to gain traffic — they can have their own private mini-grids, instead, and use marketing to bring in hypergrid traffic from other grids.

Maria Korolov is editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business. She has been a journalist for more than twenty years and has worked for the Chicago Tribune, Reuters, and Computerworld and has reported from over a dozen countries, including Russia and China. Follow me on Twitter @MariaKorolov.

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